To finish off my week of Gaming Records, I figured I would talk about something that played into both of my major interests in life: Video games and writing. As someone who aspires to possibly write video game scripts for a living, this one really blows me away just thinking about the collective effort necessary to receive such an accolade.

The Guinness Book of World Records lists Until Dawn as having the Longest script for a graphic adventure game. The game, a PS4 smash hit from Supermassive Games, has a final script that was reported by Sony to be 1,000 pages long. Screenwriters Graham Reznick and Larry Fessenden claim that the original script was as long as 10,000 pages long. That’s just ridiculous.

While not too huge a fan of horror games in general, I have spent a good amount of time watching various YouTubers play Until Dawn (honestly just look the game up on YouTube, everyone and their Grandma has played it), and I’ve even gotten the chance to play a little bit of it for myself at one of my good friend Tiana’s birthday parties. The depth that comes into the story when given such a wide variety of options to explore in a relatively confined but fleshed out space is honestly incredible.

Though I wish to write my own scripts one day, I will say that the idea of trying to beat a record like this is certainly a daunting task in itself.

That’s it for my Gaming Records Week, I hope you all enjoyed it and maybe even learned something!

If there are any gaming records that you know off-hand or find fascinating, feel free to talk about them in the comments. It’s an awesome subject to tackle, and I’d love to hear other peoples input on cool gaming records!

Scarface: The World is Yours was a multi-platform game released on October 10, 2006 by Radical Entertainment under the published by Sierra Entertainment and distributed by Vivendi Games. It’s a Grand Theft Auto inspired third-person action game based on the 1983 Brian De Palma movie Scarface. According to IGN, “The Scarface video game creates a gameplay environment that authentically recreates the historical time period of the film, touching on politics, news items and events of the day.”

Why did this game receive a Guinness World Record for its swearing? Well… During the course of the game’s 15-hour story there are about 31,000 lines of dialogue. Apparently, the f-word alone is used 5,688 times in just this timespan alone.

I tend to swear pretty often in casual conversation with my friends, but if I was that bad about it I know my parents would be ready to wash my mouth out with soap, that’s for sure.

44-year-old Jason Camberis, who builds and sells arcade machines and security systems for a living, was interviewed in 2015 about his massively scaled arcade cabinet, which appears in the 2016 Guinness Book of World Records. The machine is actually functioning and plays over 200 classic arcade games, including PacMan and Dragon Spirit.

The machine itself “stands taller than a fully grown African elephant” at 4.41 meters tall and 1.06 meters deep. According to Chamberis in his interview with the Guinness Book of World Records, “It brings you back in time to when you were young and you were a lot shorter and you felt that whole experience of being in front of a video game, where you’re looking up and grabbing the handles and playing the game – being in the game.”

While I personally grew up in an era where video game arcades were mostly phased out of popular culture besides in novelty, thanks to the advent of home console gaming, I have spent a good amount of time playing classic arcade games in various ports and in arcades in places like Round Table Pizza. Even if I hadn’t had the chance to play these games however, just the idea of an arcade machine that large is still astounding both in sheer scale and in ideological dedication to the foregone gaming world.

The HomeAid Essentials Donation Drive is going to be held from April 29 to May 8 in Orange County. The HomeAid of Orange County, a charitable arm of Orange County’s Building Industry Association, and the Children and Families Association of Orange County have held this drive for the last eight years.

The Drive collects diapers and other hygiene products for homeless mothers and homeless families in shelters that need these essential goods so that the money normally spent on the donations can be spent to help the families get back on their feet. I wrote a preview for the drive as a whole and for its opening “Builders for Babies” event that will be on Friday the 29th from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at Angel’s Stadium. If you live in the area, be sure to come to the event! Not only will you be supporting an important cause, but you’ll get to watch professional homebuilders create structures out of empty diaper boxes.

One major responsibility of being an assistant for the Daily Titan’s editorial staff, at least in the news department, is actually writing deadline stories. In my experience, news is a very fickle and ever changing subject. Plenty of news happens the night of a deadline (especially on a daily paper) and comes out totally unannounced for one reason or another. Many of the stories I’ve written have been given to me on deadline, since a paper always needs content and staff writers aren’t always the most reliable or convenient sources on a last minute basis.

This story was actually a pleasure for me to write as far as deadline night stories go, however. Not only is the event itself important and interesting, but the source I was able to get in touch with for such a last-minute bit of coverage was more helpful than I could ever ask for, making the story much easier to complete.

If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here. You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

In 2012, the Guinness World Record was set for the world’s Largest Video Game Controller. The NES Controller, 30 times larger than its original counterpart, was shown off at the launch for the Guinness Book of World Record’s 2012 Gamer’s Edition in London, England.

Created in five months by Ben Allen, a British Engineering student, the controller measured 366 cm x 159 cm x 51 cm and weighed about 265 pounds. Two people were required to push each button enough to get it to work, and it could communicate with a standard controller – allowing it to actually play whatever game it was linked to.

Here’s a fun record to kick things off. Did you know that the largest game of Minesweeper was created by the company CineMassive in August, 2015? 2015 was Minesweeper’s 30th anniversary, and to celebrate this the video wall company teamed up with Minesweeper developers to create a massive version of the game.

The dimensions of the game’s playing area were 246.84 inches wide by 92.96 inches high, or about 20.57 feet by 7.75 feet, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. The game was so big that it required 30 HD TV’s linked together to show the entire thing. Overall, 38,799 mines were hidden in the playing field when the “Super Challenge” was set to expert mode.

Now, personally, I’ve always been really terrible at Minesweeper. I even sunk a lot of time into the Pokémon Heartgold and Soulsilver pseudo-version of Minesweeper, Voltorb Flip, and could barely get anywhere fast. However, it’s awesome just to imagine the sheer size of a game that big. I’d love to have the chance to try it, even if I’d probably lose in about three seconds or so.

My Mom is a book editor. She does some freelancing work, some fact-checking, and runs a blog about her work and her interest in the English language over at Dara Rochlin Book Doctor. Her interest does serve as a good dose of inspiration to me, as a lot of my passion in life revolves around the written word as well. While working on a post for her blog, she looked up a number of word-related accolades from the Guinness Book of World Records. That gave me the idea to look up a series of records on video games, since they’re obviously a large part of my life as well.

So, consider this something of an experiment I suppose. Over the next five days, I’m going to have a short post go up each day talking about a different record out of the Guinness Book. I’ll either choose them for how impressive they are, or I’ll choose them because they might have some personal story attached to them. It’ll depend I’m sure, but either way the records will hopefully be interesting for everyone seeing me talk about them as much as they’ll be interesting to me. Seems like something fun for me to do really, so I figure why not?

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now, so I hope all you viewers out there enjoy my Gaming Records Week.

As promised, I’m going to start updating my Daily Titan articles page each time I have a new story published.

I wrote a news story last night for the 4/20 issue of the paper about the first in a series of different candidate interviews for a Dean position in the University Extended Education program. Dr. Riad A. Ajami participated in multiple forums on the 19th, one of which being a student open forum where he answered questions about his life experiences and his goals as a prospective Dean. He’s applying to be the “Dean of the University Extended Education/Associate Vice President, International Programs and Global Engagement.”

It was a little bit more work putting this particular article together, as there was some confusion regarding the kind of forum that was being held when I attended. We were asked not to record anything from the meeting on the off chance that it could cause problems in the overall process, so all my notes about the event besides the student interview I did were purely handwritten.

If you want to see the story in its entirety, you can see it here. You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!

This is probably going to be a little bit different than my usual posts, but honestly I feel like it’s a service I need to provide. Today is April 13th, or 4/13, and today was the day where the final update for a webcomic called Homestuck was uploaded.

For those of you who have heard of it, this post will seem easily redundant and underwhelming, but for those who haven’t heard of it, here’s a real basic synopsis of Homestuck. Homestuck is a webcomic created by Andrew Hussie which follows a group of kids as they play a game together where the end goal is to create a new universe. It gets much more hectic than that, but the story is so long and so layered that it would be impossible to do it justice here. The comic has been running since April 13th, 2009 – It’s seven years old as of today where its seventh act has both debuted and concluded.

An image from Homestuck’s final flash: [S] Act 7 Image courtesy of mspaintadventures.comI don’t really have anything profound to say because the ending is so fresh, and I have no desperate pleas to get the comic readership since it has a pretty strong cult following as is. I just wanted to say that the comic has been a huge part of my life for literally years now, and it’s helped me cultivate a lot of ideas and friendships that have led me to become the person I am today.

I wanted to thank Andrew Hussie and all those who helped him create the lengthy masterpiece for all they’ve done however I can, and this seemed like a fairly appropriate way to do it. I’m looking forward to the epilogue whenever it’ll be posted, as well as the game that’s been in production based on the Homestuck universe.

For anyone who hasn’t seen Homestuck and wants to check it out, you can by going here to this series of numbers: 88888888

So… Last month, Serebii – the site I follow for my Pokémon news and have followed for a long time – made a post regarding a leaked image from CoroCoro magazine in Japan in which they teased a “special edition” on Sun and Moon coming around April 15th. You can check out their March 12, 2016 archive for evidence of that.

I have been greatly anticipating this special issue getting leaked, as the pain of waiting for information on a new Pokémon game has been killing me. And today, they leaked the first images from this month’s magazine.

Image Courtesy of Serebii.net

Apparently, we aren’t even allowed to see the new box art legendaries yet. And there was a promise that next month’s issue of CoroCoro will have a big scoop on Sun and Moon. Yeah this is fine, it isn’t like we were promised more or anything. This news was put out this morning, I actually waited all day to see if anything more would come out. Hopefully some more does come out around the promised date of April 15th but… It’s a little frustrating to see the empty game boxes.

Granted, I understand that there could be some issues that were unexpected that have delayed getting information ready to present, but deep down I get the feeling this is just a way to build extra hype for the game. I just want to see something more, guys, this whole waiting thing is killing me.

But hey, at least we also found out that Magearna is a steel/fairy type. So that’s great. Mawile part 2 here we come.